It was
not his choice to be there. He hadn’t even been asked, which he felt was
completely unjust, seeing as the events of the following hours would most likely
change his life forever. As he sat down on the tacky, blue cushioned chair, he
felt the unimpressive number of eyes in the room follow him. Whom did he expect
to show up? He didn’t even know where his mother was, and what would she care,
anyways?

There was rack of magazines that sat limply next to him. The magazines slouched
off the narrow shelves, drooping and withered. Their pages were exhausted, now
practically useless. He felt he had more in common with the magazines than any
one else in the room. There was a Spanish woman four seats away who clutched a
rosary and rocked back and forth, chanting. The tears streamed down her cheeks
as if no one was watching, and her murmurs sounded as if she believed someone
could really hear her. There was a little girl in the red dress with a bow in
her hair who sat at the table with a purple crayon. She drew a dog with a
spindly face and crooked tail. The dog was pathetic.

Dogs are
never purple, He thought. Perhaps if there had been a close friend or relative
sitting next to him or maybe even a casual acquaintance, he would have spoken
this cynical remark aloud. He glanced at the seat to his left.
There was no one sitting there, no one with which to share the cheap humor of a
sarcastic comment.
The blue cushion looked back at him, the void of emptiness that stared back at
him was stronger than he. Intimidated, he looked away.

The chair beneath him screeched as he slowly twisted his legs on the floor,
rocking the chair back and forth. The chair was not his friend. This much had
already been decided. The chair was where he would be located as the words were
spoken, the ones that would define the majority of his teenage life, and the
integrity of his adult life.

Oh wait, that was a mistake. The chair would be behind him, waiting like dark
jaws to catch him when he fell. Not the kind of catching that a mother's arms do
when her child trips on the street. The kind that snatches you into its grasp
and never lets go, leading to often-painful experiences. More like a
grandmother.

He heard them before he saw them, and he knew that this was old, tried, and
tested business. Another life shattered, another heart splintering, more tears,
more anguish, more loss. They squeaked, like the chair beneath him and he began
to think that the trend was no coincidence, but an omen. He could not decide
whether to be offended by it, or to embrace it. Was this unlikely similarity
comforting or taunting?

Their faces were blank, like a piece of paper before ink is pressed into
the bright pulp.

"Mr. Quinn?"

How could one lack emotion so totally? How could someone trapped in such a
devastating profession not understand the pain they were inflicting?

Surely, they had experienced it to, before repetition had made them such stones.
"Yes?" The voice was not his own. It squeaked. He could never before remember a
time when he himself had squeaked. In fact, as he sat there, about to stand and
face the change, he was unable to recall any squeaks before this day in his
lifetime. The bicycle he rode religiously every day of his childhood never
squeaked. Or perhaps he was so in love with the bicycle that the squeaks never
got through to him. They never reached his virgin ears. Or maybe they did and
his ears turned the sound away. He didn't want to soil the godly image the bike
held, and so in order to protect himself, he rejected the sound from ever
entering his being.

"I'm so sorry" the Doctor said. He could have been saying that it would
be rainy on Thursday. You aren't, really, he thought. It was more causal a
thought than he believed was possible at this time. He knew that while he sat on
the cushioned chair, ready to rise and shake the man's hand, or perhaps give him
a gentle slap on the back, that the doctor before him was not sorry.

Or maybe he was. But not for his sake. This man was sorry because as he
lay down to sleep tonight, he would know that he was the villain. He was the
taker of lives. He was the most professional grim reaper there was. Incased in a
white bubble of papery fabric, a sad imitation of what happiness might look
like. Professionalism was the last thing he needed. He needed choking breaths on
the floor beside him, to match his own.

"We did everything we could" They didn't he thought, once again, a casual
snide remark. Was his heart betraying him? Like all those book and movies with
complex psychology, that you thought would never happen to you. The ones written
by women with short hair that had been dyed too many times, and who were holding
books against their chests, dressed in lab coats. Why are they always dressed in
lab coats? They shouldn't be even qualified as medical doctors, after all they
never write about facts. It's all theories and ideas… and those lab coats….why
am I thinking about lab coats? I'm about to be told that my father is dead, I
pretty much already have been told that my father is dead and all I can think
about goddamn fucking lab coats.

He looked up the doctor. He was waiting, his hands limp at his sides, fingers
apart. Two white bellied fish on the hooks of his wrists. The doctor's
forehead had beads of sweat across it, laundry hung up to dry.

The boy stood up, clenching his suede jacket between his hands. "Thank
you," he said. He skirted around the doctors, making a wide berth. They had
touched his fathers dying and then dead body, even if through plastic gloves. He
continued on his way, out of the glass door where he could see the lights of the
cars exiting and entering the parking lot. He didn't expect them to let him go.
"Sir, we need you to fill out some forms, you can't leave quite yet. We know
it's hard and we hate to ask you for it just now, but it is mandatory
procedure."

He turned, almost smiling with an incredulous look on his face. He put on his
jacket and smoothed out the creases on his jeans with his shaking hands. "No,"
he said, not looking at them. "I don't think I can do that right now." He
chuckled softly as the tears began to spill. He turned and walked out of the
hospital, away from the sterile, white halls and shuffling slippered feet. He
stepped into the cool night air and cupped his hands while he lit a cigarette.
He took a long, deep drag. He held the smoke. His father was dead. The only
person who had ever cared about him. He blew the smoke out into the cold air
and watched it disappear, just as he soon would.

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